


We're like déjà vu

by sinisterkid92



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Lucy is in a band, Timeline changes, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-26
Updated: 2019-03-16
Packaged: 2019-10-16 14:46:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17551703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinisterkid92/pseuds/sinisterkid92
Summary: Flynn and the Time Team returns to the present to find Lucy, who they left behind on that trip, not there anymore. Denise and Connor have no idea who she is, and her importance to the team.At her band's first concert in a long time Lucy spots a strange man in the crowd, one she thinks she remembers but can't place. When he later tells her that he needs her to save the world, and that time travel is real, she needs to decide if she wants to help them erase her life or to save the life she now has.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this in early November. It's not finished yet but I decided to share it anyway. This was a twist I wanted to see in a future episode of Timeless at some point, but now it gets to live in fics instead. The "movie" sucked a lot of creativity and must out of me, so I'm trying to get that back. About four or five chapters have been written so far, so I'm going to update about once a week or so :)
> 
> I hope you like this!

The crowd in front of her seemed to stall for a moment, drawing a collective breath in the pause of the music. She brushed away a stray strand of hair that had stuck to her forehead, the sweat from the heavy lights leaving a thin sheen on her body as she heaved. For a moment she just watched them, the baited breath of anticipation. Her chest heaved, trying to pull more air into her lungs. Adrenaline coursed through her veins. This was the high she could never stop craving. 

Somewhere in the crowd a person shouted, a wordless acknowledgement of their presence. It wasn't that which distracted her. That she was used to. Errant screams of excitable fans that sent a shrill of excitement through her body. No, it was him. He looked like déjà vu, someone she should've recognized in a dream. Dark and tall and a statue in the moving body of the crowd.

Then Jason played the next chord, the sound from his guitar vibrating through her and everyone in the room as Jackie joined him on the bass. When Bryan took the first beats on the drums that was her cue. It pulled her away from him, she had to rip her eyes off of him to get back to the show. 

What was it about him? She snuck glances at him throughout the song. He looked a couple of years older than her, something about the posture screamed military, and he was handsome. Not the Chris Hemsworth or Idris Elba handsome, but he was no doubt good looking. In her career she’d come across many handsome men, some fleetingly and some for longer and more intimate times. But she’d never seen him before, couldn’t place him anywhere, despite knowing deep down that she did know him. 

It was no doubt eerie. This man who looked like someone she was supposed to know. Her eyes fluttered back, distracted and it was showing no matter how hard she tried to play her part on stage, but found the place he stood before empty. She scanned the crowd but the bright lights made it impossible to see, and she counted the sets until the song which would dim the lights again. It was four sets away. She had to concede. He was gone.

An hour later the crowd had dispersed. A few photo journalists mingled in the backstage area, flipping through the images of the show on their cameras. This was their first show in a while, and it had attracted a lot of attention. She did her best to avoid the corridors the journalists occupied, taking the long way around to her dressing room. The first tour they did after getting their music label deal they had all shared a dressing room, it was another four tours, three of them world tours, and four albums before they each got their own as they played bigger stadiums. 

When the adrenaline started wearing off and she once again faced reality in that dressing room she collapsed. On a coffee table that had seen better days there were flowers standing, and she knew who they were from. Not a lover, not a friend, and not anyone in her family. It was the label, sending flowers to thank her for once again making them money. She could still hear the people outside the door talking, Jackie’s laugh was as loud and clear as ever and for a moment she considered joining them. This wasn’t like her, to withdraw after a show. Usually, she was out there with the rest of them celebrating. 

A lot had happened since the last show, though. She pulled her phone out from the pocket of her jacket that hung behind the door. 15 missed texts, two missed call, some countless notifications from her social media accounts, and one message on facebook. She ignored the rest, opening her messenger for the first time in ages and felt her knees buckle underneath her as she read the words she’d longed to read for too long. 

_“I went to see your show tonight and you were really good. Send me a message if you want to grab something to eat and catch up, it would be nice.”_  
Amy Preston – 10.23pm 

The floor was cold against her bare feet as she typed her reply with shaking fingers. 

_“I’d love to. Time and place is your pick, my treat. I miss you.”_  
Lucy Wallace – 11.10pm 

\--------------------------

She was 19 when they started the band, her sister was just 11 years old. In a way, Lucy understood her sister’s reluctance in having a relationship. Lucy had left her whole family behind to pursue her dreams. Find any type of wiki page on Lucy and you’d see that she was born Lucy Preston, not Wallace, and that she had changed her name after dropping out of college her sophomore year to pursue a music career instead. Lucy, formerly Preston, Wallace had one sister, her father was dead and her mother was alive somewhere. 

Find any wiki page and it would write in clear text that she had no relationship with her family. Her family was not supportive of her music career. Her family did not like the music False Alarm played. Her family were never named, never found. 

It was one of the mysteries of Lucy formerly-Preston-now-Wallace. One of the many things not even the most sluth of fans could figure out. The revelation that Lucy’s birth name had not been Wallace made headlines for a brief time in 2007, before the world remembered there were more important things to focus on. 

This was why Lucy did not begrudge her baby sister for keeping her distance or being angry. The fact was that Lucy had divorced herself of her family the night she came home to tell her mom she was quitting college and joining a band. The oil patch on the road as she drove to her mom’s house, that could have spun her into the lake and taken her life, was a sign. She knew it. She just barely managed to stop herself from spinning off the road and into the lake. It was a sign to take control of her life and to live it how she wanted to. To no longer live under her mother’s thumb and do her bidding. This was her life and she had to live it how she wanted to live it. 

Her one regret was leaving her sister behind, because being their mother’s daughter wasn’t an easy thing to be. It couldn’t have been easy being the only daughter left. Their mom probably put the hammer down harder, restricted Amy more than she’d had Lucy to prevent her from following in Lucy’s footsteps. 

Now Amy was 30 and while they had some form of relationship with each other it was sporadic. It begun with their mother’s death the year before, a sudden one for Lucy but a long outdrawn process for Amy who had been their mother’s caretaker the last months of her life. Neither her mother nor Amy had told Lucy that she was sick or that it was terminal. One last manipulative and cruel joke her mother pulled on her daughters, one last way to have something over Lucy. 

Instead of joining the band for drinks she decided to head to the hotel. She’d been up since early morning and she didn’t feel like she could party the same way she could ten years ago. For a while that had been her life, a constant stream of parties, mingling, and networking. The people that she needed to meet now didn’t hang out at those parties, they were at award shows and in conference rooms with tailored suits. 

The large bathtub called to her instead, a 2am bubble bath sounded divine. So she drew herself a bath as she scrubbed her face clean of the heavy stage makeup. Just as she turned the water off and was about to undress and step in someone knocked on the door. It was in the middle of the night and no one had any business knocking on her door. Yet for some reason, in the pit of her belly, there was a feeling that she should disregard reason and answer the door. 

In the early days of their band, before they lived at the fancy hotels with concierge and all those things, fans had a bad habit of showing up at their doors. Back then they shared rooms, both because they couldn’t afford more and for safety, which made those visits more creepy and less dangerous. Occasionally, a fan would slip past security and find out which rooms they were in later on in their career, which could have turned ugly if it weren’t for their good luck. 

Just in case, she checked the peephole to see who it was. Not that it would tell her more than that it was a stranger on the other side. She didn’t know who she expected to see, but it wasn’t him. 

Without thinking she unlocked the door and swung it open. Whoever he was she needed to know why she felt like she knew him. Why she felt that connection to him. 

“You,” she said.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And so the story continues.... Flynn and Lucy meet and we find out more about what has happened and why Lucy doesn't remember who she really is

“You.” She said. It wasn’t the rudest thing she’d ever said to open a conversation, but showing up after 2am unannounced to a strangers hotel room wasn’t particularly nice either. He was tall, that much she knew from seeing him in the crowd, as he towered above most of the people around him. He wasn’t as dark as she thought he was, the eyes that had seemed pitch black were light underneath the fluorescents.

“We need to talk.” He left no room for discussion, pushing his way past her into her room. It should have alarmed her, and it did, but only intellectually. Deep down there was something that told her she had no reason to feel alarm. She chastised that part of her. That part was about to get her killed and she was not about to let that happen when she was finally rekindling her relationship with her sister. 

“What are you...?” She twisted around to see him inspect the inside of her lamps and the surfaces behind the TV and headboard of the bed. “What are you looking for?” Was he looking for bugs? She had never been as confused in her life as she was now. It was like she’d stepped into an action movie where she was the unsuspecting bystander who was about to get brutally murdered to further the main character’s plot towards ending the Big Bad. 

When he seemed to have given the room an all clear he turned towards her again. “Do you remember me, at all?” he asked, searching her face for something. She shook her head. 

“You look familiar though, where do I know you from?” He laughed, like he wanted to say “that’s a long crazy story”. 

“We’ve met before,” he said, brushing it off. “I hate to do this to you but you’re in danger Lucy, and we’re trying to fix it but we can’t keep you in the dark anymore, you need to know what’s out there.”

“We?” she asked, and she watched his face go blank as he didn’t answer her, then his eyes flickered to the corner of the room. 

“It’s going to sound crazy, Lucy, and I honestly don’t know how to tell you in a way that’ll make you believe me.” He seemed to be trying to remember something. “You know that night in the car when you were going to tell your mother you were joining a band and there was that oil-slick on the road?”

“H-how do you know about that?” She hadn’t told anyone about that. It wasn’t a secret, per-se, but it was a moment in time that she safe-guarded and was only for herself. No one, not even close friends or partners had known about that moment. 

“You – you wrote about it in a journal, that you gave to me.” He rubbed his eyebrows as the explanation already had become too involved and complicated. “That night, it didn’t originally happen like that. I don’t know what changed exactly, you were supposed to go into that lake and almost drown. You didn’t join a band and you didn’t become famous, instead you became a history professor and you… you lived another life entirely.” 

She turned away from him and walked towards the phone by her bed. “You need to leave. I’m calling security and either they can take you out or you can leave by yourself.” He was in front of her before she could blink, stepping between her and the phone. 

“This,” he held out a leather notebook with a strap wound around it, “was your journal. Look inside it. It’s your handwriting.” He held it out towards her but she didn’t take it. She’d learnt in her life that the way to deal with people who were dangerous was to remain calm, but she wasn’t about to entertain his fantasies either. He opened it instead, stopping at a random page where someone had written about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. She’d written enough lyrics in notebooks like that to recognize her own handwriting. 

“Anyone could have written that.” Sure, it looked like her own handwriting but she was by no means an expert on handwriting. She was sure that there were plenty of people whose handwriting look similar to hers, and since she would usually release handwritten lyrics of songs along with album releases someone could have easily copied her. 

“You wrote it and in it you write about the car accident.” He shut the journal, holding it close to his chest. “You were about to drown when someone saved you. It made you vow to only put yourself in situations you could control. You never joined this band. You lived a careful life until you were recruited by Homeland Security after I had stolen a time machine to help find me and capture me.”

“Homeland Security? A time machine?” She tried to step around him, to get to the phone. 

“Stop Lucy and listen to me!” He looked like he regretted raising his voice immediately. “Time travel is real, and you went with us but you were sick before one mission so we went without you and when we came back… it was all different.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a locket. “How would I have this, if it weren’t for time travel?”

In his hand he held a locket, one she had never seen before in her life but somehow looked familiar. Like him. Like a memory just out of her reach. On the tip of her tongue. When she gave no sign of recognition he opened it, revealing a picture inside. It was of her and her sister. A picture they’d never taken. They looked maybe three or four years younger than they were now, at a time when they weren’t on speaking terms. She took it out of his hand to inspect it. Was it photoshopped?

“Where is this from?” She eyed it closely, looking for light shifts and odd angles that would indicate that it was manipulated. Their cheeks were pressed together and from the little she knew of photo manipulation it was that it would’ve had taken a lot of skill to manipulate a photo that well. All signs pointed to that it was authentic. 

“It’s yours. You lost it once, or you gave it away, but I got it back…” He closed his eyes, looking like he was trying to decide how much to say. If what he was saying was true, that meant he knew her and had had some sort of relationship with her. He knew her, a different her. How difficult must that be for him, to talk to a person he knows but she doesn’t know him? 

Her heart wrenched as she looked at the photo, at the lost potential. This was all that she wanted, a relationship with her sister. It was the thing that had been missing from her life for the last decade and a half, and in that photo she had it. How must that have been, to be close to her baby sister? 

“We need to change it back, Lucy.” He pulled her attention away from the locket. “We need the old you back, because without you everything is at risk, history and time… any moment now it could all change and we wouldn’t know it.” She carefully stroked the photo, tried to soak up the memories in it. “There’s this… organization, operating on a large scale in all aspects of our society manipulating culture and policy to suit their own interests, they kill people and they do not have everyone’s best interest in mind, just their own.” 

“Okay, let’s say for one minute that this is real–” she had to admit she was starting to be convinced – “why care about me? If I don’t know anything about them anymore why not consider me out of the picture, one man down?” 

He stalled for a moment. “Because your mother and father was a part of them. They were… important figures in the organization, descendants from the founder.” 

“You’re insane.” She scoffed. “My mom was a history professor and my dad was a maths professor.” She shook her head.

He hung his head in shame. “Not Henry Wallace,” he said, wincing. “Your biological father was a part of Rittenhouse.” 

It was like a bucket of ice was poured over her head. “Fuck you, whoever the fuck you are. Out!” She shoved at him but he barely moved, he just absorbed her shove. 

“I’m sorry, Lucy, I shouldn’t have told you that I should…” He grabbed at her wrists, not hard but firmly enough to stop her from pushing him. “But because of who you are they are after you, and now you are vulnerable.” He sat down on her bed, releasing her hands and clearing the path to the phone again, but she didn’t feel the need to call security anymore. For some reason she believed him. Her emotions and instincts were giving her a whiplash. Something instinctual believed him, something deep in her, and for some reason she couldn’t shake it. Why? What was it with him that did that?

“I know you have a PhD in history,” he said after a while. “It helps to work with Homeland Security,” he answered her unspoken question when she looked at him confused. While music was her life now she did end up regretting that she dropped out of college. She started taking online courses when she couldn’t attend classes, and by strategically planning albums and tours she was able to not only finish college but eventually get a PhD in history, in her real name. Lucy Preston, not Wallace. 

It was a strange hobby to have, considering how tough it was but for some reason she stuck with it. Somehow it felt as if she was supposed to be doing it, like it was natural and her place in the world. She did it for no one but herself, and if she ever wanted to do something else with her life she could teach, or something. She didn’t know. But she’d always believed that some day it would have a purpose, that calling to history. Was this it?

“It might be too much to ask, but we need your help to bring our Lucy back.” 

“You want help to erase myself and put another version of Lucy back in my place?” He nodded and winced. “Yeah, I know you know how bad it sounds.” She waved him off, like she actually did know him and knew that that was just what he would say. Honestly, she had no clue but whatever it was he wanted to add she didn’t want to hear it. 

“We need your help to save the world, honestly.” That was a sentence she never expected to be said to her in complete seriousness. 

That Lucy, at least, had a relationship with her sister. It was one reason to prefer her life over her own. Though it sounded like a suicide mission. 

“Fine. It’s not like I can say no to _saving the world_.” She tightened her lips. “Where do I sign?”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I definitely thought I updated this last week, but apparently I did not. But hopefully I'll get a bit better at updating from now, going to set aside some time to get some more writing done on this. Hope you like this one!

“Lucy Wallace, the star singer of False Alarm, disappeared mysteriously after the band’s tour premiere in Los Angeles at Nokia Theatre two nights ago. Though nothing indicates foul play authorities are expecting the worst –”

She shut the TV off, catching herself in the reflection of it. Two days. She hadn’t expected them to wipe her off the face of the planet when she agreed to help them. Yet, as soon as she agreed to help he was rushing with her out of the back door of the hotel and into a black SUV with tinted windows. It gave her no time to think or reflect, at least not of anything more than the fact that she’d left a perfectly good bath behind. So much for that relaxation time. 

By the time she arrived to this place, she realized that she hadn’t even asked for this man’s name before she agreed to be essentially kidnapped. Luckily for her, he wasn’t a murdered and seemed to be telling the truth. The people that met up with her were in fact Homeland Security, and none of them seemed to trust or like her presence. 

Garcia Flynn, Wyatt Logan, Rufus Carlin, Jiya Marri, Connor Mason, Denise Christopher. They were the people she met there. Four of them knew her, two of them were unsure of her presence and could only go on the word of the others. It was weird, them knowing her or a version of her, and she knowing nothing about them. 

What were their similarities, or their differences? She didn’t want to know. At least, she thought so. Right now she was happy not knowing anything about the other Lucy who had a relationship with her sister and wasn’t a singer in a band but once a teacher at Berkeley. About the Lucy she was going to be replaced with. 

They told her they’d traveled to 1974, and something there had caused her to not crash into a cold lake at age 19 about 28 years later. It didn’t make sense. What could have happened February 1974 that had ripple effects to the early 2000s? She had to know what they did to cause that in order to help reverse it. To save the world. 

She got up from the chair she sat in. Sitting still was impossible. What she was asked was impossible. Erase all experience she’s had the past 18 years and all of her accomplishments, to save the world. She had to admit, her life hadn’t been going great lately. While her bandmates had started families and found spouses during the past years, she only had her studying and the band going for her. Even that had started to feel empty and ungratifying. She wanted more. 

But she didn’t know if she wanted to erase all of those years and replace them with a whole other life. A life she knew nothing about. She turned the TV back on.

“– There is a lot of speculation going on, but right now we have no reason to suspect foul play or that Lucy Wallace is in any sort of danger. While her absence at tonight’s concert is a disappointment for the band’s fans, we’re doing what we can to help the people around her locate her and bring her home.”

It was a man in a suit sitting at a morning news show desk, gesticulating with firm and certain hands as he spoke. He was reassuring, convincing, and from what Lucy had heard there were many wild theories going on out there regarding her sudden yet still brief absence. She had never missed a show in her life, had never had to cancel a single one. This was a first. 

Why did she do this to herself? She groaned, and switched the TV off, again. 

A knock on the door pulled her attention away, looking up to find Garcia, or Flynn – she didn’t know what name he actually went by – standing by the door. 

“How’s it going?” His eyes were on the now black TV-screen, but she knew he’d seen what she was watching. She shrugged and shook her head. 

“I’m not the Lucy you know.” The stack of opened books on the dresser had left her more confused than she was before, and she wasn’t even sure she believed in time travel yet. Everyone here believed in it, they said they’d traveled back in time. She had to trust them, had to trust that they were telling the truth because she’d left her whole life out there. She couldn’t go back even if she tried now, with guards standing by the door. Agent Christopher had even threatened with treason charges if she were to leave.

“You’re Lucy,” he said, as if that solved everything. “You’re smart, you’re resourceful, and you’re tenacious.” He paused. “You’re not doing this on your own, we’re all doing our part, so it’s not all on you.” 

“Did she feel guilty, too?” He nodded. “I was just about to see my little sister again for the first time, so you better not be lying about this because if you are you just ruined my chance to be her sister again.” She reached for the locket that hung around her neck, clutching it in her hand, hoping for the other Lucy that her life with Amy was better. “Did you know her?”

He shook his head, shoving his hand deep into his pockets. Guilt, she knew what that looked like, and now she knew how guilt looked like on Garcia Flynn. Whatever it was, she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to hear another tragic reality where her sister and her weren’t together. But she had to. If she was going to create it she had to know what that was exactly. 

“Is she dead?” Flynn shook his head, to her relief. 

“No,” he swallowed. “On my first trip I saved the first landing of the Hindenburg, intending to blow up the second flight due to the people who would be on it. People who were supposed to die survived, and your father didn’t meet your mother, which meant that Amy… was never born.” His mouth pulled, regret coloring his face. “I never meant for that to happen but… I erased her.”

“And now you want me to do the same?” Whatever twisted life it was that she had now it was better than that. At least Amy was alive, at least she had a life and she was doing something with it, at least she lived. At least. It didn’t matter if she had a relationship with her sister or not, that wasn’t what was important. It was that Amy was alive. 

“I don’t know how she exists now,” Flynn said. “Even if we change history again now, change it back so that you are who you’re supposed to be, that doesn’t mean Amy will be erased again. It doesn’t work like that. History is tricky and it never does like we want it to. Amy might stay this time. But if we don’t do anything… we have absolutely no control over what happens.”

“I just got her back, I came with you because of that locket!” Her chest heaved. “You tricked me!” She jabbed a finger into his chest. 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” He rubbed his face. “I didn’t know you didn’t have a relationship here, in this time. I’m sorry. I truly am sorry. But they were after you, you would have been taken by them, or killed–”

“Screw me, what about Amy!” He looked forlorn, like there wasn’t anything he could say to defend himself. 

“I promise Lucy, we will do everything it takes to keep her here.” She wasn’t easily convinced. “But staying in this timeline, not going back to our own, our very reality can change in a second without us noticing and it could be worse, they could erase Amy and you, and me and my entire family…”

“Your family?” He jerked back at the thought of it, as if suddenly remembering what she didn’t know about him. They had been close, she could tell with how familiar he was with her even when he tried to keep his distance and be respectful. 

“My… my wife and daughter were murdered, by Rittenhouse.” Her featured softened when faced with his grief, sudden and clear on his face. Sometimes it was easy to get stuck in her own grief and pain, to be selfish and not see other people. 

“I’m sorry.” He gave her a tight smile. “I should’ve known there was something in this for you.”

“All of us, everyone you met, have lost something to Rittenhouse,” he said. “We all have a stake in this, we all have something to lose and something to gain.” His eyes locked on her hand that was squeezing the locket. “I’m sorry that you had to be dragged into this. We really did try to keep you away for as long as possible.”

“When did all this start?” she asked, evading the difficult topic and instead going for background. How many years did he have on her, of knowing her?

“For me it started in 2014, but I stole the time machine in 2016.” His smile would have been mistaken for bashful had it not been for the glimmer in his eyes. She was about to ask him about the stealing part of the sentence when it dawned on her.

“Four years.” The silence stretched between them, heavy and expectant as she considered it. It wasn’t like one of those action movies where the big bad was beaten in a few days, no this was more than a marathon. She tried to remember where she was 4 years ago, it was around the time where the band had decided to take a break. Jason had just had a baby and Jackie was pregnant with her second son. She was neck deep in trying to get her doctorate. 

Four years meant that he knew her, they all knew each other, like family. A lot could happen in 4 years between people. She rubbed her arms nervously as she considered this information. There were too many questions to ask about those four years, but she settled on not wanting to know. Right now, she felt better off ignorant. 

“I have your journal–” 

“No,” she cut him off, “I’m fine, I’m going to save the world but… I’m fine.” She didn’t want to know who she was. She was better off not knowing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter we're checking in with Flynn and his POV on this :)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And here is the first stop to Flynn's POV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> updates are a lot slower than I thought they would but at least there are updates.....?

It had been two months since they returned from the trip that had erased Lucy from their lives. For him it was like an echo, an absence. There was a space where she was supposed to be yet no person there to occupy it. Of course, it had always been a fear that one day this would happen, one day they would return to a world that was irrevocably changed. No matter what they did this change was fixed. Trip after trip, they came back to her not there.

Two months ago he had stepped out of the lifeboat to find a bunker that was subtly different, things in places they weren’t before. Then, no Lucy. 

“How’s Lucy?” It was Jiya who asked, not him. He wondered, after, why he hadn’t thought to ask. It was as if that absence had already registered in him, like that emptiness beside him had already imprinted itself, knowing without knowing. 

“Lucy?” asked Connor, fiddling with the computer in the launch bay, distracted with registering all the diagnostics of the lifeboat. “Who’s that?”

“Lucy’s Lucy,” Wyatt had answered, laughing at the absurdity of the question. Yet, underneath it was the panic they all were feeling. A nervous bottomless panic that would not be assuaged by any explanations their minds could come up with. No, Lucy’s Lucy. She would be there.

“I’m sorry, we have no idea who you’re talking about,” Agent Christopher answered. 

He barrelled through the group and up towards the computer Connor was working on, pushing him aside. No, Lucy was there. She had to be. 

The quick google search of Lucy Preston pulled little results. There were some fan forums where her name was mentioned in, a few pay-walled research articles that he supposed Lucy could have written, and web-archived articles from 13 years ago about a Lucy Wallace.

Wallace, he’d known that name. The image search confirmed her suspicion.

“Lucy Wallace?” Connor frowned at the screen. “What’s she got to do with this?”

“Wallace?” Jiya asked from the bay beneath the platform. “Wasn’t that… Henry’s last name?” Three men nodded their head, Rufus pulling Jiya towards himself in a hug. 

There she was, Lucy, but the pictures looked several years old. She dressed differently, her hair was different. More curly and messy. She was much younger, in most of them holding a mic in her hand. There was a slew of professional photographs, for interviews and magazines. A thumbnail for a Good Morning America interview, one at Jimmy Kimmel. 

His stomach clenched. 

“She’s a singer, in a band,” he said. It was the first thing he’d said since returning and he found his voice was thick with tears. “I think I know what changed.”

Now, she was back in the bunker but it was not her. Some things were the same, the way she carried it all on her own shoulders, unable to forgive herself for the mistakes she’d made in her past. At the same time, she was hardened in a way that the Lucy he knew wasn’t, in a different way. The Lucy he knew had been hardened in the battle with Rittenhouse but she had still remained in touch with her humanity, still found the human connections and desired it. There was something more distant about the Lucy now in front of him, she was more guarded and less inclined to give of herself. The hardness wasn’t from grief, from what he could tell it was from loneliness. 

The journal and the locket was all he had to keep the Lucy he knew close to him. She’d started writing a new one, the blank one she got from her mother, just in case they needed her to go back and reset it. There was nothing he treasured more than that, right now. Her words, the last entry written just prior to the last trip before she was erased.

 _... everytime they leave, I’m afraid they won’t come back._ It was the last sentence written, midway through the journal, a worry for them but not for herself. They went back, put themselves in danger, not her. Of course she would be alright, of course. They hadn’t messed with them since the NSA tried to erase Flynn four years ago or with Agent Christopher. It was a messy game with potential retaliation that would distract from the true mission of Rittenhouse.

He wanted this Luct to have it. For her to know about who she was and why that Lucy was so important to save. For the mission, for the world. Without her they weren’t whole and everything was worse. Successes they’d reached in the past had been erased, Rittenhouse was stronger than before, they’d never crippled them like Lucy helped to do in 2017. It was bad, it was worse. 

In the months since the change he’d researched this Lucy. Though a public figure, famous enough that everyone knew who she was when they said her name, there was little about her online. There were paparazzi photos of rumoured boyfriends, gossip articles, and a handful of serious interviews. A Rolling Stones article in 2013 where she briefly mentions her family’s disapproval of her choices in life, but there’s no hint that she knew of Rittenhouse. In the end, this was her perfect escape. Until him.

He missed her. He missed her so much it hurt. Missed the small things like her smile over morning coffee, the worrying wrinkle between her eyebrows when she read. The smell of her hair when he held her at night and her head rested just underneath his nose. He missed –

No, he couldn’t go there. There were things he could not think of, things that would open up a hole in his heart and swallow him whole. That was forbidden territory. He set up rules, early on, of where he would go in his head. He could not grieve her, not like that, he had the chance to save her and maybe get back exactly what they had. Get back what they lost. Or it was forever, irrevocably, changed. Until he’d exhausted all possibilities, fought until he could no longer fight anymore, he wouldn’t go there.

She was there, in front of him, a dangled possibility. Lucy now, this Lucy, looked so similar yet so different. They were the same person but they were not. 

There was no version of her that he wanted to hurt. Yet, he knew he’d already hurt her. 

After their brief conversations, he felt deep regret at bringing her in, while still confident it was the best decision. It was hard to consolidate those two emotions in his head as they existed simultaneously with equal fervour. All he wanted was the Lucy he knew, yet Lucy Wallace was still far too similar, despite having lost all memories of him. He felt sick with the guilt but resolute on that he needed his own Lucy back.

There was some part of her, it seemed, that remembered him. History, they had learned the hard way, had a strong desire to remain the same. Maybe there was some part of the human psyche that couldn’t be changed, no matter what the timeline did. An instinctual primitive memory seemed to remain. Perhaps, it was that part of them that Jiya could tap into, the one that transcends time and finds what is constant?

Either way, there had been a small spark of hope when she opened her hotel room door like she knew in some way who he was. Like he could pluck that part of them out of her mind and bring her to the moment they’d been separated. Like nothing had happened. But he was just a face in the crowd that reminded her of someone. It had no meaning, really. It happened to everyone. 

It helped that Lucy Wallace looked different. She didn’t try to tame her curls like their Lucy would. This Lucy’s hair was wild and though it was messy it was charming and it suited her. All that was missing was a leather jacket and the rock look was complete. She had more piercings than Lucy had, though the piercings and tattoos he only knew about because of his unhealthy habit of googling her before he went to pick her up. She no longer had the nose ring, and the tattoos on her body were covered by long-sleeved shirts and trousers. There was also a slight more roundness to this Lucy. She was still thin, very thin, but she had more muscles and a little more fat on her. 

It was subtleties, in the looks, that did it. That short wild hair created the most startling juxtaposition, because the Lucy he knew was poised and meticulous about her looks. Without her mother’s influence and manipulation in adulthood Lucy had not just chosen a different career path, she’d also physically changed. 

No matter how he twisted and turned it, it was disconcerting. 

What he felt about it was irrelevant, though. This was how it was now. A temporary situation and a temporary Lucy until the real one came back to them. It all would be easier if he could just view the Lucy in front of him as someone else. Not Lucy at all. Just a dopplegänger. 

He’d offered her Lucy’s journal, to get to know the person she was bringing back. It wasn’t the journal he’d been given 6 years ago, it was the new one. Denise had hinted at the existence of another journal in this timeline but he hadn’t taken the bait. All this was temporary, no need to get the details. This was the one his Lucy wrote. It was wrinkled and worn from him reading it over and over again the past months. 

Where had she gone? Where had Amy been before? The return of Amy had given him hope. Painful hopeful longing that crushed his heart at night. One day his Lucy would return, she had to.


End file.
